Opensource Apple Lossless Decoder Released

Cody Brocious writes "David Hammerton has released version 1.0 of an ALAC decoder. This allows users of operating systems not supported by iTunes/QuickTime to listen to their Apple Lossless files, a proprietary competitor to FLAC. This is a large leap forward in audio codec interoperability, and paves the way for an ALAC encoder." The site also asks for additional help on the project.

Comments

How long before Apple sues?

[alexwcovington]

They seem to be cracking down on their most enthusiatic community members lately.

Pardon me for asking...

[winstonmeister]

...but I just don't see why Apple felt it was necessary to make another lossless format. While Apple in the past has been accused of often suffering from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome, it seemed like they were improving in this area: the iMac helped popularize USB, the open-source core of OS X has its roots in BSD, iTunes supports MP3s, their web browser gives source back to Konquerer, etc. Anyone have any theories as to why they didn't just use FLAC? After all, the work was already done for them...

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Tyler Eaves]

Huh? I could encode flac at over 15x realtime on my old Athlon 900.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[yawweb]

So, I have to ask a question, having looked at your site.

Why bother with reverse engineering ALAC? So far, I have seen / read mention of only one major useful thing that has been learned: ALAC uses adaptive compression algorithms.

You state on your site that you don't like being locked into restrictive DRM formats. So, don't allow yourself to get locked into it. Don't support it.

Given the information you have gathered about the format, it seems to me that it would be far more productive to join the FLAC team, and work with them towards adding adaptive compression to FLAC.

IMO, it's through direct support of open projects such as OggVorbis and FLAC, and companies that are willing to implement these open products (such as iRiver) that we will end up with products that work the way we want them to.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have wireless routers with almost-GHz processors in them?

Thought not. It probably has a 250mhz amd Geode or something similar, if it has a general purpose processor at all and doesn't entirely run in gate-level hardware designed specifically for the task.

Re:Pardon me for asking...

[dgatwood]

Actually, the argument that it was designed to have "just enough" CPU power is flawed. The argument, as you reworded it, that Apple uses "just enough" power is, oddly enough, precisely correct, I think. Very fine line.

...as in power management.... While the CPU can probably do some serious work at full throttle, there's always a tradeoff between that and battery life.

Yes but...

[FiReaNGeL]

Will he get sued? Proprietary format... Apple... Lawsuits...

Also, considering that "Apple never released any documents on the format", its incredible that this guy wrote a decoder. Some people are truly amazing sometimes...

Stream Ripping?

[CtrlPhreak]

As I understand it, all the wireless Airport express streams use apple lossless codecs. How long before we can have a program to intercept these wireless music streams and then convert to mp3s or whatever you want? Pretty crappy way of getting music, slow etc the more I think about it, but why not?

Re:Stream Ripping?

[crazney]

That's not at all true, the only reason I want it for is entirely legitimate.

I have all my music stored in iTunes, and I'd like to be able to play them on a 'remote speaker'. The remote speaker in question is my media server, connected to my stereo.

All the computers in my house I have access to, and none of them are DRM-protected music (ie, iTMS purchased music). So there is no reason for me to want to use Airport Express data for any sort of piracy.

questions

[Anonymous Coward]

if i compile this on Linux will MPlayer pick it up and use it? or will XMMS pick it up and use it???

Re:Little use to me....

[jsm008us]

If you had used Windows or a Mac, or had used someone else's Mac, then you would need this encoder. The guys who helped make this encoder spent months working on this project, and continue to work on it. This might help push more people to use linux (to switch) and have more univeral applications.

Re:Little use to me....

[mrchaotica]

I have a Mac as well as several Linux machines, and an ALACFLAC conversion tool would be great for me.

I actually thought about writing one myself by hooking into Quicktime, but I never got around to learning the API.

ALAC on linux, finally

[KingOfTheNerds]

We used ALAC all the time at the studio where I worked, but alas, some of our software was linux only and would not compile under OS X. This was very frustrating and required multiple computers. Finally with this system we can move over to this software as a solution. I love linux and would rather use it, but of the people I work with don't want to learn it claiming that it is more complex. Anyway, thats great that we can do the job with ALAC decoder! I'm sure other studios forced to use ALAC will be very happy with all of this.

Gstreamer + iTMS

[Goalie_Ca]

If you're a gnome user you should probably check up on Planet Gnome. Here's one blog in particular that may be of interrest.

Nice.

[theparanoidcynic]

I was just thinking this morning how nice it would be if both my iPod and my Linux boxen supported a lossless format besides uncompressed PCM, and here's the solution.

Desire warping reality? Nah, if my desires warped reality I wouldn't be quite as single. ;)

Regardless, my compliments on a superb piece of hacking. As near as I can tell the thing works perfectly, and only a few months after Apple released the format.

I assume that somebody will whip up an XMMS plugin based on the library and/or get it into Mplayer's CVS over the next week or so, but even being able to do "alac file | aplay" is a great improvement in functionality for me.

Re:SOMETHING FOR ALL THE HATERS!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You just gave me an idea. It would be pretty cool to have "The Hunter" "dialogue" generating machine. Well, cool for trolling purposes.

What's the link to the forum again? I remember reading it a while ago but never bothered to bookmark.

Stop the hate and congratulate, indeed.

Re:Great applications with high quality audio

[jbn-o]

Sounds to me like a justification to make and distribute a free software FLAC QuickTime plugin so our friends burdened with the proprietary QuickTime implementation Apple distributes can play streaming FLAC data or play FLAC files.

I see no technical justification of Apple's Lossless format that convinces me it is superior to FLAC (of course, since Apple's Lossless format is only available in proprietary software, it will always lose for those that care about software freedom). Yet I'm sure people will use it and encourage others to use it because it is distributed with their proprietary software. In this way, it reminds me of the odd stance some people take with Ogg Vorbis versus MP3--they know that the Vorbis codec has performed at least as well as MP3 in many listening tests, they acknowledge that Ogg is a better encapsulation format (allowing for more expressive tags, for instance), and they insist on using "the best tool for the job". But they cave in to popular pressure to conform to using a lesser "tool" and endorse the continued use of MP3, sometimes even exclusively (which is really silly).

I hope nobody interprets what I'm writing as though this takes away from this new BSD-licensed Apple Lossless decoder. I'm grateful for what has been done here--it was needed and it is a great contribution to the free software community. I think there's a great future for it at archive.org in case anyone submits audio encoded with Apple's Lossless codec. This could allow archive.org to decode that and re-encode it with something else (many archive.org recordings are encoded many ways). However, when I distribute losslessly encoded copies of audio, I'll continue to dismiss Apple's Lossless codec out of hand and prefer FLAC. I help manage the website for a locally-produced talk radio show called "News from Neptune" and there you can find copies of the show encoded in FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and Speex. FLAC serves our needs excellently.

Re:Let us rejoice!

[EggyToast]

The problem is that most people experience quicktime on Windows, where it tries to take over your media file associations, embed itself in your web browser, and generally bug you during use with its non-standard interface (for Windows, that is).

On the Mac, it's an entirely different story, with elegant integration and very clean use (small size, not much overhead, etc.).

I've been using Quicktime Pro to encode video on my own website, and, without sound, am able to pick between numerous codecs I've installed to shrink 200mb video files down to around 5mb, with no real loss in quality. It's a beautiful thing. Not to mention how quickly it handles it, without wading through tons of menus.

But when I was on Windows, it was a true PITA.

But yeah, people need to understand that .mov is no different than .avi or whatever container people felt like using at the time. The fact that so many people use it to overcompress video simply for size and bandwidth considerations shouldn't reflect poorly on the media player/container.

Re:Little use to me....

[laffer1]

Lossless is part of iTunes and therefore part of Windows and Mac versions of iTunes (and probably quicktime)

AirTunes.

[Yaztromo]

Why bother with reverse engineering ALAC? So far, I have seen / read mention of only one major useful thing that has been learned: ALAC uses adaptive compression algorithms.

One possible reason would be in order to stream to an AirPort Express with AirTunes. AirTunes uses a standard streaming protocol (RTSP), but streams the data in Apple Lossless format. Because of this, you currently require either a Mac OS X or Windows XP machine running iTunes to steam audio to the AirPort Express.

Being able to stream from Linux would certainly open up some new possibilities. And being able to transcode from Ogg Vorbis to ALAC in order to stream to an AirPort Express would be pretty cool (and is something you can't currently do under iTunes, even with the third-party Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in).

Linux would still be missing the admin tools to configure the AirPort Express in the first place, but being able to stream from other OS's to AirTunes would be pretty cool.

Yaz.

Re:Little use to me....

[marmoset]

True story. Yesterday I was sitting at work, at my Linux box, and decided that I wanted to hear a particular song I had sitting on one of my OSX boxes at home. Scp the song from home to the office and I'm good to go, right?

Great, except that the song at home was encoded as Apple Lossless.

I could have actually used this tool yesterday. :)

He's from Australia

[synthespian]

He's from Australia, and IIRC reverse-engineering laws are different there. I'm not so sure Apple can sue. But, hey, maybe he shouldn't fly to the States, where - hmm - Freedom Abounds (copyright by George Walker Bush) - remember Dimitri?.
Furthermore, he's made it very clear that Apple used a lot of things that had been published before.
I don't know much about the Australian law, though, pointers are appreciated.